Account Management

If you remember the early alpha days, the anonymous account management thing created a lot of issues you and I. Well, that’ll no longer be the case. This has been moved to a more concrete system.

However, do note that this may not correctly work on first run, so I recommend you to copy your account ID and keep it handy incase you need to restore your account.

What’s New

There’s a new launch screen that guides you through your anonymous account setup process and subscription setup. During the betas, you won’t be charged for the subscription, so please go along with it. If you do get charged (Apple!), I’ll send you cookies worth the same amount.

Access restrictions are in place when a subscription expires or lapses however they won’t be effect during the betas. They’ll get activated once the app releases on the App store.

Animated GIFs now require you to tap on the GIF button to load the image and then the play button to play them. This is done so as to deter the usage of GIFs and save precious power and CPU cycles.

What’s new

On iPads with an external keyboard connected: major parts of the app are navigable via the keyboard directly. More information below.

OPML imports and exports are now available.

Updated the Share sheet icon.

Empty states are now shown where appropriate.

GIFs are no longer loaded and played by default. To load, tap the GIF icon in the bottom right corner of the image and to play it, a new play pause control is added. This is to prevent excessive power consumption and bandwidth usage.

Videos are now supported when the video format is supported by the OS.

Keyboard Navigation

In the Feeds or Feed interfaces, use the arrow keys to focus the previous or next item.

Use the Enter key to select the focused row.

In the articles interface, the up and down arrow keys are used for scrolling.

Use ⌘ + up or down arrow keys to navigate between articles in the articles interface.

Use the left or right arrow keys to navigate a gallery when it appears on screen.

Other available options can be viewed by long pressing the ⌘ key on the keyboard.

Fixes

Fixes bookmarks loading from the network again. Bookmarks are mean’t to be available offline.

Fixes checkmark appearing in the Folder selection interface for the None row even though a folder was selected.

Notes

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been carefully developing test suites for Yeti which simulate a few scenarios like: casual users, power users, long-form readers and the like. Over all the test suites, one thing stood out: The obscene amount of power wasted in downloading content which was never read in these simulated situations.

CPU

Every time you launch the app, three things happen:

Your feeds are loaded including Folders information

If any unread articles are available, those are loaded as well (upto a maximum of 25 in this cycle)

Your bookmarks are synced. Any new bookmarks are downloaded.

Permitted that there is a network connection available, there’s a lot of data transmitted over the wire. Your phone’s modem is responsible for loading this data consuming considerable amount of power. When this reaches the CPU, it converts the data to Elytra’s internal model structures and is cached in the RAM.

However, in all of the simulated tests, not all articles were read. This lead to a lot of data that was never used. So to reduce this waste, I first decided to make all unread articles load with the content. This was a good first step. To improve this further, I tested again by returning no content on any of the articles.

In both of these cases, the articles were loaded on-demand when the simulated user opened the article.

Here’s how the CPU was impacted.

As you can see, stripping the data from the articles and loading it on demand saves a lot on the CPU processing power. Modern iPhone and iPad CPUs like the A10, A10x and A11 are really power efficient, but if the app can avoid any kind of overhead, it’s always worth stripping it off.

Data

Similar trends can be observed in Wireless data consumption. By stripping off the overhead, a lot of unnecessary data was avoided from being transmitted, and therefore loaded. This not only saves power, but also saves bandwidth on your devices and this is especially critical if you’re on a metered connection. This also saves me some $$ on server bandwidth costs.

A 8 times reduction in data costs is a huge gain. All these data points are aggregate averages across the various test suites.

Overall Power Consumption

As you can imagine, reducing CPU and data usage considerably impacts power consumption. This is not only great for your device’s battery, but also an invisible user experience benefit.

It’s immediately evident that this was a step in the right direction. Not only do we all save money, bandwidth and time, but also should be able to use our iOS devices for a few charge cycles more or at least that’s the vision.

This change is now available in the latest build of Elytra. Apart from this, here are few other things:

The dark themes no longer cause jumpy navigation bars.

There is a basic implementation of In-App purchases. You can try it out. This won’t affect anything in the app. Also, you aren’t charged during the Testflight run.

That’s it, it’s the new name and App icon. Yes, Yeti still remains our internal codename however, since this is the first Beta build, I couldn’t think of a better time to finally reveal the actual product name we’re going with: Elytra.

There’s also a new domain name. An .app domain. I’ve been waiting to acquire this domain so I can finally release the Beta.

Known issues

When working on some features and fixing some bugs, I ended up running into a lot of UIKit bugs. Following are some of the known issues Elytra will present which we have to depend on Apple to fix:

When using a dark theme, the navigation bars will misbehave and present a lot of unexpected states and behaviours.

When searching inside an article, the highlighted area is often mis-positioned to the left or right (this depends if you’re using a LTR or RTL idiom) however, scrolling up or down a little positions this highlight correctly.

What’s New

Added support for mark elements to highlight text in paragraphs and blockqotes

Fixes

Fixes footlinks jumping to the wrong section

Fixes a crash when an article has a lot of content. Like, over 10000 words!

Attributions page is now fully functional.

Fixed search for Feeds

Fixed search for articles

The final alpha build is out. I look forward to hearing from you lot on the new improvements. As I now slowly work towards polishing the app up and work on the macOS app, I look forward to your criticism, feature requests and love/hate emails. Have a fun weekend, and enjoy reading.

What’s New

Authors: Supported publishers have been enhanced with author support. This is currently limited to http://macstories.net and http://sixcolors.com. If you’d like to see support added for your favourite publisher, get in touch. You can now view all posts by a single author and tap on the ⦿ to view information about that author. Author bios in the article interface has been scrapped.

Push Notifications: Push notifications based on WebSub are finally here. At the moment, only this blog supports Push notifications. As more and more publishers begin supporting WebSub, this list will expand, and automatically. Just find the bell icon in the Feed Interface. If it isn’t there, the publisher most likely doesn’t support WebSub at the moment and therefore, push notifications won’t be available.

Filters: Maybe it’s Game of Thrones release time and you’d like to completely avoid all spoilers. You can setup keywords under Settings > Filters and these will apply throughout Yeti. Once you add new filters or remove existing ones, don’t forget to refresh your feeds.

Fixes & Improvements

Improved accessibility labels for the “Mark all read” button making it more descriptive.

Fixed rendering of <aside> tags from certain publishers.

Some articles wouldn’t display embedded images. This has been fixed.

Improved quote rendering on iPads.

Fixed a rare crash that would occur on the iPad Pros (2017) when marking an article as unread.

Improved sync speed for bookmarks.

Also, major news: this is the penultimate alpha build of Yeti. After the next build, I’ll be starting work on the Beta feature set (which is small, but contains a larger locale set for testing on my end). Once the alpha run is over, I’ll be freezing the spec on my end for the server side parser.

This is going to enable me to enable publishers to add new meta tags to their article pages to customise rendering aspects inside Yeti. This is the major component of the beta run. Which means, there will be fewer beta builds, once every 15 days or so.

We all hate delays. Especially when it comes to airplanes and commercial flights. But this is alpha-grade software. Today is Friday. You’re most likely not waiting for a new build notification to pop up on your screen.

But I do have a very good reason for this. Let me break it down:

1. Bookmarks

I’m not even sure why this turned out to be this tricky to implement. Bookmarks are great when they are online on some server your phone connects to. But Yeti promised (actually, I did) to make them available offline. This is easy when it’s only a single device. Multiple devices is very tricky though and I did not want to spend time on a full fledged sync service.

But, as always, I have it figured out. Mostly. I have a lot of testing pending on my end (automated and manual). Once those are through, the build will be a third ready.

2. Author Bios

Why aren’t more RSS readers doing this? It may involve manual work (as in the case of Yeti) or some person smarter than I can figure out a contextual way to grab this information off the publisher’s website. Well, Yeti doesn’t have the time to wait for some popular app to do it. You’ll be able to browse articles by that particular author as well as read about the author towards the end of the article (if you enable it under settings, it’ll be off by default).

3. Push Notifications

I spoke about Realtime RSS here and I’m glad it all worked out to be simpler than I aniticipated. So to bring these advantages to you, I’m working out the interface and potential “fine grain” settings that you can tweak to get notifications about new articles from your favourite publishers.

So the app itself isn’t delayed. It’s still on track according to my tracker (assuming it’s functioning correctly). What is delayed is the week 4 release. So week 5 will have things from both of these weeks. I moved things around so this will be a big release and I get more time to implement things a little better and make sure everything works smoothly for my wonderful alpha group (*cough* unlike a certain release cycle *cough*).

Fixed

List rendering in some cases where a single item had multiple components in it.

Images & Galleries no longer overflow bounds of iPhone screens.

What you won’t see

I’ve added preliminary support for the Subscriber part of the WebSub1 protocol to the backend. This vastly improves how I fetch new articles. Currently, it’s only enabled for this blog. New publishers, you add to the service, which advertise their hubs will be automatically added. For all existing publishers, I’ll manually check and verify.

I talk more about this and the upcoming near real-time capabilities of Yeti here. ↩

have the app update itself in the background when the system determines so

The implications of the above are grand.

If the above holds true, which by means of this post: I am looking for feedback on the above, I not only save money, but enable you (and myself) to get real time notifications from publications which really matter to me. As since Yeti will be paid there won’t be any add-on cost you’ll have to pay to get this. It’s all part of the package.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter in the comments section below.

You can choose which publishers to receive notifications from, just like you would on Youtube. ↩